A Miscellany of MenChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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A Miscellany of Men
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played
the fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in
my pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls;
things addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I had
written up in what I supposed to be the dining-room:
James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
Then eat and eat and eat and eat,
or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric
was scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something
beginning:
When laying what you call your head,
O Harrogate, upon your bed,
and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing,
and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in
memory; for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century
the house was very different.
I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low
square windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream
of lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least,
was standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express
if I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red
chalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to
withdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct
accents to a very smart suburban maid, “Does Mr. James Harrogate live
here?”
She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was looking
for him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. I
had one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and then
decided not to look for him at all.
THE PRIEST OF SPRING
The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty
but of revolution, There are two great armies of the human intellect
who will fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is to
be congratulated on fitting in with the Spring--or the Spring on
fitting in with Easter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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